Michael Pollan Returns (on consciousness)

Expert, I'm Dan Shepherd, and I'm joined by miniature mouse. - Hi. - Tweet tweet.

Returning guest, but first time in person, I think it was a zooming.

- He was zooming, yeah. - He had the zoomies. But he's here in person. He's wearing a very cute sweater, and it was very fun to have him in 3D. Michael Pollen, an award-winning author in journalist,

"Hot a change in your mind." A movement, a sociological phenomena. - Yeah, changed people's minds. - That's right, this is your mind on plants.

“I think that's what we spoke to him about.”

The Omnivore's dilemma and other big huge hit, indefense of food, and his new book, which is the trippiest by far, I enjoyed the hell out of it. A world of peers, a journey into consciousness. Please enjoy Michael Pollen.

(upbeat music) - How are you? - Welcome, thank you. - Happy to have you. - It's what are you up on?

- Thank you. - It is a good song. - I thought your sweaters was these, they were white. - I picked this one out, but she approved it. (laughing)

- I mean, before I got to the register.

- Always good dab of second opinion.

- Definitely. My wife has taste, he's an artist. - Really nice. - Have you been offered everything to drink? - Yes, I have your liquid desk here.

- I wish you like caffeine, you are a call. - I do. No, I'm okay. I've had my caffeine for the day, but thank you. - That's true, we did discuss caffeine last time.

- I have different caffeine rules on it. - Yeah, I've made acceptance all the time. Like yesterday, I had a talk at night, and I was exhausted after a long flight, had a coffee. I didn't kill me, I swear.

- What time? - Four in the afternoon. - Okay, that's risky. - Yeah, I know. You're playing a fire, but I knew I was so tired.

- Yeah, I would overcome it. - How are you as a sleeper? - Not bad. - If you have issues, is it falling asleep or sustainously? - It's staying asleep, it's waking up,

and then ruminating. - That's a hobby of mind too. - I know, I hate that. - And do you find that when you wake up, you're like, I don't care at all about that thing,

I thought about for now. - Yeah, that seems so important.

“- I know, it's nuts, and you have to imagine,”

well, this is gonna look different in the morning. - Yeah, you're armed with the history, so I'll go like, oh man, I'm spiraling about this, and I know I won't care in the morning, and it hasn't been good.

- No, yeah. - That should do the trick. - This is a perfect launching off point for your book. This is madness, right? - This is kind of just this undermining of you.

I gotta say, first of all, I love your book so much. - Thank you. - It launched me into so many philosophical directions as I love for that to happen, but also daunting to cover in one interview

to be honest with you. - There's a lot of dimensions to it, but we can just pick out the parts you wanted to have. - Yeah. - Well, I want to talk about all the parts,

and I know you have a heart out, so I'm gonna get right into it. - Okay. - Have we started? - Always.

- We're ABR, that means always be recording.

- Okay, good to know. - So we're...

“- It's important that people know you picked that sweater out.”

- Yeah, I can do this. - Yeah, or that your wife, a perfect fit. - Even when you didn't know you were being recorded, you said my wife has great styles, you're an artist. That's really, I get points for that.

- That's amazing. But I was thinking before we get into this, I would have to imagine, you tell me if I'm wrong, at this point you're most known for how to change your mind.

- Yeah, I mean, amongst a certain group, other people know me for the food books. I'm almost a dilemma in defense of food. And I would say it's about equal. You know, when people come up to me,

strangers in a restaurant, it's like 50/50, are they gonna talk to me about their diet or their last psychedelic trip? - Right. - And I try to guess which it's gonna be.

- If not the start of you were the first to anchor it publicly in academia or some kind of science so that this revolution of openness to psychedelics, you're really, really integral in. - Yeah, that had to do with my age

that I had some credibility talking about health from the food work and I was new to it. I was kind of a naive approaching psychedelic so I could be a stand-in for people who were curious but not experienced.

And it did kind of legitimize the conversation. One of the things that struck me on this book tour is I can sit with people, I did a podcast with us or climb New York Times guy, very state institution. And we just had an open conversation

about our psychedelic experiences. - Exactly, that's okay. - Exactly, that's okay. That's what I'm saying. There's been a cultural movement where it's totally fine to talk about people

are very now honest about it, people are curious. You have somehow shed all the connotations that existed from the 70s drop-out culture and psychedelic tie-dye stuff. It is transformed.

- The scientists deserve some credit for that too though. I mean, they did some really good science. - Yeah. - And that legitimized it also and I was amplifying their message. - Yes, so again, if I had to put in order of things

Number one would be someone's dreams. - Dreams. - Yeah, that's the worst. When someone's telling you about their dream I want to go, and it didn't happen. - Oh, my God. - But it didn't happen.

- That's the least of it. It wasn't interesting. (laughing) It's a lot, you know, we read novels about things

that never happened and they're fine.

- Yeah, that's true. - Yes. - It's that they don't make sense. - No, they don't have them here. - No, they don't. - They have no coherence. - And they didn't exist on Planet Earth in some respect.

- I mean, there's just nothing about it. It could be like, hey, I imagine to new color you haven't seen. Oh, great, tell me about it. You can't find purchase in this at all. - I'm kind of interesting because they are saying something

about what the person is thinking about or rumenating on or dealing with. - Yeah, and therapists find them useful and interesting. It's true. You know, we went through a transition on dreams.

First, it was Freud who said they're frated with meaning. And then the more modern neuroscientists said now, they don't mean anything. It's just the brain taking out the garbage. - Right. - Yeah.

But now they're swinging back to, yeah, they may mean something. - That's a great example of what everything suffers from, like this binary opposition of either they mean nothing or they mean a ton and it's probably somewhere on that spectrum.

“But you have to hear about a lot of people's trips.”

- Yeah. - And how do you get through that? (laughing) - I'm very polite and patient. Every now and then one is really interesting

and surprising. Often people are talking about how their lives changed as a result of a psychedelic trip. And I'm kind of collecting those stories. And I'm interested in that.

And I'm gratified that people read the book decided to have an experience and it actually had a positive effect on them. - I hear about a couple of negative ones too. People feel they have to write me when it's total disaster.

- Oh really? - Oh yeah. - They reach out about that. And I've heard sometimes from relatives of people who died. - Oh really?

- And that's very heavy. - Wow. - I mean it's very rare, but there have been some cases. Older people who have had a heart attack during a trip and a underground guy didn't call the EMT's best.

- I don't feel like that. - Yeah, and a rusted. That's one of the reasons the fact it's underground is not healthy because you can't count on guides to do the right thing.

'Cause they have so much at stake. - Yes. - And then accidents, people screw up and do stupid things. - Operate hand gliders and stuff. - Yeah, especially when they don't have a guide

or anyone on planet Earth to kind of talk them down. I would argue that your book played a role and you're willing this to try my show. - Yeah, definitely. - Really?

- Definitely because, yeah, people were talking about it

“and it didn't feel like this honestly illicit thing.”

I was like, oh, smart people are doing this. - Yeah. - DAX had been trying to convince me to do it for a really long time trying to send me science. And I was like, I don't care about that.

- I don't know. - And I trust you. - I trust you. - Yeah, I trust you. - Yeah, exactly. Like, these are the people trying to get you

to do it. So yeah, it did legitimize it. But also, you just corrected something 'cause when we were starting, I'm not gonna tell you what happened.

But because we just said that's boring. But during the trip, I was starting to panic and DAX did say no one's ever died doing this. - Very helpful. - Yeah.

- Very helpful. - It did help, but I guess it was-- - No, not from the mushroom. - No, yeah. - No, no, no.

- But a guide in that case. - I was sober and everyone was on terms

and I've done them a million times.

And so I knew to say, let's say go walk in the neighborhood. - It's so helpful. - Look at these houses. And also, just someone saying, surrender to what's happening.

Don't fight it. 'Cause it's really when you fight what's happening. Let's say your ego is completely melting away. It feels like a death. And our tendency is to resist and hold on to reality.

“But that's the worst thing you can do because you can't control it.”

But if you surrender, you end up in another place that's often so much happier. - That was the pivotal moment. - I said, really, to some effect to you, you get to choose how this is.

That's the great thing. It's gonna happen in the next few hours and you get to decide what you're gonna do. - You get to choose whether this is an enjoyable experience or a miserable one.

That's such a life lesson, you get to choose. - It is a life lesson. And so is the surrender idea. We spend so much time fighting with the inevitable. And sometimes surrendering is just incredibly liberating.

- Yeah, very counterintuitive. That freedom could be on the other side of the surrender. - Yeah, surrender. - Okay, so your new book, "A World of Pears" a journey into consciousness.

Let's start with some definitions. So let's just talk about consciousness and then maybe sentience. - Yeah, so consciousness is very simply subjective experience. The fact that you have subjective experience

or even experience, it's necessarily subjective. I even think the word subjective in this case, we could benefit from, what does that mean subjective? - From your point of view. - Can't be measured, it's inside.

It's the first person point of view.

It's the eye. And that's a challenge because our science is designed for third-person situations objective, quantitative. But here, only we know our minds. And so for science to penetrate that is a challenge.

Another definition that I like is Thomas Nagle, it's a philosopher who wrote a wonderful essay in the '70s, quote, "What is it like to be a bat?" His premise is bats are very different than we are.

they have so in our basically,

and they get around through bouncing sound waves off of things, they can't actually see. But we can imagine it's like something to go through the world that way. If it's like something to be you,

or to be a bat, or to be an ant, then you're conscious. There's some feeling attached to being you. And that's not true of your toaster. - Yeah, I was going to say, I love when you say, I can't really imagine what it's like to be my toaster.

- They're talking. - Yeah, so far, we may have an eye toaster soon. - Yeah, yeah. - There's no consensus on what consciousness is, right? - No, there are at least 22 theories of consciousness,

which suggests that we're not close to answering. But it's called the hard problem. The hard problem is essentially, how do you get from these three pounds of mushy neurons between your ears,

two subjective experience, two experience of an eye, to the voice in your head? And we have no idea. It's really a question of how do you get from matter to mind? So that's the hard problem.

- Yeah, one's a material world. It's neurons, it's electricity. It is measurable things. - Yep, we could count neurons and we could measure the electricity. - Can we know if they're active or not?

- But we don't see when they swirl together

or magically hit critical mass and become a thought.

We don't understand that.

“- And we don't know that that's how it works, too.”

There's this assumption we have that a certain arrangement of neurons in the brain and connections will somehow produce consciousness. That consciousness is an emergent property of some order of neurons.

But emergent property sort of sounds scientific, but the more I pressed, it was like ever cadaver. - Yeah. - You get from, and how do you get there? And there's a lot of hand waving.

It's a really hard problem. As one person put it to me, it's one of the three biggest mysteries in the universe. Other tubing, how do you get from dead matter to life? And the other one is, why is there something

and not nothing? - Uh-huh. - I mean, at the big bang, it could have worked out very differently. - Yes. - And these are all questions that we're gonna be struggling

with, I think, a long time. - Yeah. - When you wrote the book, did it occur to you that it might be hard to get people to be interested in consciousness? And I asked that sincerely because I've read

your previous books and I got to interview you about a previous one.

“And even this one, and I think I would be somewhere”

on the upper end of the spectrum of introspection and interest in this. And even I was like, how much do I want to learn about consciousness? Because I go into it with a little bit of,

what do we talk about? No one fucking knows. What is this exploration even gonna yield? But I found, as I read it, I got more and more interested. But did that even cross your mind?

Like, how many people are interested in exploring their consciousness? - It's a weird thing because it's the universal, right? It's the one thing we all know better than anything else. We have direct experience of consciousness.

Every other experience is indirect. It's through consciousness. We infer other things. Yet, many of us go through life without thinking about consciousness at all.

There's a period like in your teen years where you're asking a lot of big questions. For me, I was reading Herman Hessa and writing poetry and thinking about consciousness briefly. And then years went by.

And it wasn't until I started experimenting with psychedelics that suddenly I became, what is this? - It was just magic that's happening. - Yeah. And that's a very common reaction to psychedelics.

It does kind of de-familiarize consciousness. So you've suddenly, you know, why is it this way? Why isn't that way? Because you've altered it. - I followed my curiosity.

This was a funny book in that I had no idea where I was going. I just set out on the road. And I learned everything I could. And I certainly had moments of who am I

to write about this. And then I realized, well, I'm a conscious human being. - Yeah. - Yeah. - That's qualified.

And I'm pretty good at explaining things, so maybe. But I had dark moments of, I'm lost in this subject. This is really hard. This is beyond me. - Yeah, as a writer, it must be hovering above you

at all times. I will need a conclusion at some point. - Yeah. - I can't understand it with more questions than I can. - Yeah.

- But I didn't know what it was going to be. And the ending really surprised me, too. I mean, I ended up somewhere I didn't expect to be at all.

“- You start off, and I think we could follow the order of the book,”

is like, the first big question to ask is,

okay, this is a product of our evolution clearly. Why does it work the way it does? Why do I need to make decisions? Couldn't all of this be automatic? - Oh man, yeah.

- That's a really important question. So your brain is going 24/7, doing all sorts of things you're not aware of, like maintaining your heart rate, blood pressure, blood glucose, keeping you in this narrow range of variables, homeostasis, it's called.

And if you fall out of that range, you die, eventually. So the brain does a lot. It's also taking an information and processing it and creating intuitions and all this kind of stuff. So the question then is, well, why is it all automatic?

And the best explanation I heard from that and it is an evolutionary explanation, is that you need consciousness for things that are really

And the biggest for us in our species, we are social beings.

We cannot exist alone. We have a long childhood where we're completely dependent. And if we can't navigate social relations, we got hierarchies. Yes, hierarchies and established bonds.

And so consciousness allows you to navigate that world. You can imagine your way into the heads of other people. You can predict what they're likely to do.

“You can say what you need to form a bond with them.”

And that would just be way too complex to automate. Yeah, that was historically called, like, theory of mind. I can think about what you're thinking about. And I can cater to that. That's exactly my needs, Matt, and that's pretty complex.

And requires consciousness. It is a dimension of consciousness. And then also, you point out, often we have competing needs to return us to home real estate. So I'm tired and I'm hungry.

You need a way to arbitrate when you have needs that compete.

So yeah, I'm tired and hungry, which one should I favor first?

Which is more urgent? It creates a space of decision making when you need to make a decision. The other interesting theory related to this is around uncertainty. When you're in a situation that is really uncertain, it could have some danger to it.

You know, is that a bear or a rock? There's a big black form over there. And consciousness allows you to coditate about that. Think about it and decide what to do. Model out some scenarios.

“Do I get closer to confirm one way or another?”

What's happening? Yeah, you can create a lot of scenarios in model. That's right. And choose between them. And counterfactuals, kind of a fancy word for imagination,

imagining the different outcomes or the consequences of your various acts, all that too in an environment that's constantly changing and is not predictable. You need consciousness for. And you can imagine in evolutionary story

where the people who had this ability, let's say to imagine counterfactuals, did better than people who just kind of were going through life cautiously. When you say that evolutionarily, obviously, it's beneficial for us to have conscious.

But was there ever anyone that didn't? I mean, like we don't evolve to have it, right? There are theories. I mean, I'm guessing, as you just said, that it did evolve, like everything in life evolved.

However, there are people who argue that consciousness may proceed us, proceed life. And that consciousness is kind of a property of the universe. And there's no way to prove that because under the title of idealists who believe we exist in this sea of consciousness

and we channel it. We don't originate it. It's a kind of a weird idea, but the conventional ideas aren't really proven out. So we have to have an open mind.

And we've already stumbled into the first hurdle,

which is there isn't a single consciousness either, probably. So there is the consciousness of this really adaptive social primate us. And then there are lesser consciousness, there's less computation going on, less caution, simpler versions of consciousness.

We have one word for consciousness, or in the best case, sentient enters the conversation. But in general, we don't have 65 shades of this, or just kind of exploring consciousness. So you take us to plants right away.

Yeah, so I should define sentience. I did do that earlier on. So sentience is a kind of a simpler, more basic form of consciousness that may be common or universal among living things.

And sentience is simply the ability to sense, feel, changes in your environment, and recognize whether they're positive or negative for you and to gravitate toward the one and away from the other. So it's very basic, it's an awareness.

And it is generally servicing homeostasis. So I may organism that has to regulate my temperature. It's hot here. I can pursue a colder area to regulate that, or I can search for food, some basic stuff.

“And even single-celled creatures exhibit these qualities, right?”

There's chemo-taxis in bacteria where they go toward molecules that are food and away from molecules that are poisoned, toxins. So I looked at the case of plants. I wanted to see maybe where consciousness begins or how widespread it is in nature.

And plants are an interesting case, 'cause we don't think of them as conscious at all. And they're just furniture of our world in a way. There's actually a lot going on with plants. We're not aware of it, because they're behaviors.

We don't even think of them as having behaviors, but their behaviors are slow. As soon as you do time laps, you realize, oh, they're really up to all sorts of things. They exist in a different scale of time than we do.

I found this would be a very interesting chunk of the book, 'cause you talk about it was believed to have been an episode of Star Trek or something where a creature came to earth in Alien, that moved at lightning speed.

They were on a much different timeline. And when they got here, and they were moving so fast and they observed humans, they didn't think humans were alive.

They were just these chunks of meat

that could be brought back on the ship. They turned into jerky for the ride home. Yeah, when you really start thinking about that, that is very direct one to one relative to us in plants. We don't see them moving, but they're moving all the time.

- Human arrogance, really. Like it's not moving at our speed, so it doesn't exist. - I got into some kind of trippy conversations with some of the scientists by posing this question,

“well, what would the world be like without consciousness?”

- Yeah. - And it's very hard to imagine, because the world, as we know it, is the product of our consciousness. We have a certain size.

We have a certain speed at which we operate, but everything is just a construct of our perspective. And our senses, we have these five or six senses. And there's very different ways to construct consciousness and plants have a very different way,

and it's obviously slower by our standards.

The scientists would say when I asked them this question,

like, what if there was no consciousness? What would you see? Well, do you want to look at it microscopically? Or macroscopically? He said, just particles and waves.

This table to be true to the one perspective of this table, this perspective of physics, is this is 90% empty space and particles and waves flying around. But to humans operating at our scale, it's solid, and you can put stuff on it, and it doesn't fall through.

So it doesn't have to be that way. - Yeah, if you could slow time down to the power of 100, we could watch, yes, electrons move in this table, and it would expose all this empty space.

- So heavy. - Yeah, it's so trippy. The one that blew my mind was, one of the scientists you were talking to, and so will the standardized tests for intelligence

in a mouse is we create a maze for it,

and we create a treat at one end of it,

and we measure how quickly you can go through the maze. So he did the same with a corn plant, and he set up the route at one end of the maze, and he put some fertilizer, some nitrogen, and some corner of the maze,

and the corn plant found the most direct route to the maze. So the whole thing about looking at plants, grew out of actually a psychedelic experience in my garden. I was doing psilocybin

when I was working on how to change my mind. I had this experience in my garden that the plants were conscious, and they were looking at me. They were very benevolent because I was their gardener,

and I took care of them, but they were like returning my gaze, and as often happens with the psychedelic insight, you know, does it have any truth quotient at all? - Right.

- It's valuable. - And I decided that I should test it against other ways of knowing, and see if this was a crazy idea or maybe had some kernel of truth.

I started interviewing these people who call themselves plant neurobiologists. They're botanists. They're known neurons involved, and they know that. - They're trolling.

They're trolling the more conventional botanists. - They're doing these, they're doing these really cool experiments, including the one about the maze, and there's some videos,

actually I just posted some of these on my website, of being plants looking for a poll to climb, and they make this circular pattern when you speed it up, and what's really weird about it is I've seen being plants do this in human scale time,

and I just thought it was accident. They spun around until they hit something, and then they were off to the races. But these being plants know exactly where the poll is, right from the beginning,

“and they're like casting, and that's how it actually is.”

- Without eyes. - It might be echolocation, we don't know, because when they're cells divide, they make a little sound, and maybe they bounce that off of things.

Anyway, that was kind of spooky to watch. So plants can see plants can hear, if you play the sound of caterpillars munching on a leaf, they will take defensive actions. Just based on the sound,

if there's a pipe with water running through it underground, even though it's perfectly dry, they'll hear that sound or that vibration, and they'll send their roots over. If they're put in a pot,

they'll share soil and resources with related plants, but with competitive plants, they'll fight. - So they have a sense of self and other data, which is, we have sentience is taking an information making decisions

to return to homeostasis. They also have these accelerated growth cycles if they're in the shadow of another tree to escape. So they have variable growing speed. - They'll also invest more roots

in a region where the nutrient content is rising, even if it's not as high now as another area, which suggests some sense of the future. - Forecasting. - Yeah, that there's a trend line,

and they want to be on that trend. And then the spookiest of all was that the same anesthetics we can use to put out people during surgery, puts them out too. - What? - What?

“- You might think, wait a minute, aren't they all ready out?”

(laughing) If you take like a Venus fly trap or a sensitive plant, Mamosa Pudika, which is this tropical plant you touch it and it just kinda collapses, it's a defensive move.

Yeah, or xenon gas, how do you administer an anesthetic to a plant?

You use a gas and you put it in a glass, bell jar. - That's right. - So that suggests they have these two modes of being awaken a sleep a little bit like us. (laughing)

- So now I think we should introduce there's tons of debate and disagreement in this whole field.

“I think it's relevant now to talk about what science does”

and what other disciplines do because we have a scientific fetish that's, I don't know, 400 years old now. We were born into it and we are kind of formatted. I know I am.

- I am too. - But explain or desire to be able to quantify and measure. - Well, science has the prestige in our culture as the most authoritative discourse. I've bridled against that for a long time

'cause I found in nutrition, there was a lot they didn't know. - Yeah. - And a lot they got wrong and they changed their minds. And I come out of the humanities,

I was in English major in college. I didn't study science at all, but now I'm a science journalist. Sometimes culture gets there before science. And the example I remember coming across

when I was working on nutrition was the scientists did a big study and they found that the body couldn't make use of lycopene, this important antioxidant and tomatoes, unless it was accompanied by fat. So putting olive oil on your tomatoes, good idea.

Who figured that out? It was the grandma's a long time ago. So culture figures out things in a different way from trial and error usually.

So I've always brought a certain skepticism

to my science writing and science interviewing. And in the case of consciousness, scientists in their defense, they haven't been added that long. It's a fairly new science, the science of consciousness begins like in the late 1980s.

They have made some progress, but there are things that novelists know about consciousness that scientists don't know. And you can learn a lot about consciousness reading novels. And proved in particular, or Joyce, or stream of consciousness

novels, the qualities of consciousness, the nature of thought, and the nuance, which is just so subtle that it's very hard to believe in AI could do this. There's an arrogance in science because I think they have absolutely nailed some things that are so important.

No question. And I think they built on top of that a lot more shaky stuff. And I think they think you can graph on what was learned about the electron to all things. And I don't know that it travels up as much as we think.

“Explain reductiveness, I think that's really important.”

The idea of reductive science is that complex phenomenon can be reduced to simpler phenomenon. So everything eventually can be reduced to matter and energy. And they can be reduced to each other, things to Einstein. This works for all sorts of things.

It's given us the technological revolutions we've seen. What they've done in astronomy is unimaginable of the universe from inside of it. Exactly, you don't predict where things are. And when stars hold on the rate of expansion

and all this kind of stuff, mind blowing. Yeah. But consciousness has so far resisted that reductive approach. It's not at all clear it can be reduced to matter and energy. It may yet.

Some people think if you introduce a third term information and some physicists think that's what the world consists of is information, maybe that would help us unlock consciousness. They haven't gotten very far with that, but that's a suggestive avenue of exploration.

There's an irony here, though, which is the conscious strives for a homeostasis and one of the great enemies of homeostasis is uncertainty. So we're drawn to things that are certain. And our best certainties have been these advances in science.

So I don't even know that the scientists recognize that they too are in great desire of certainty. Do a blinding degree? Yeah. Although a lot of them, when you talk to them,

are much more candid about what they don't know and about their uncertainty. In the papers, with the little abstract,

it's always declarative and they've nailed it down.

And I think from a career point of view,

“you have to sort of have that kind of confidence.”

But I always find that scientists are a lot more willing to talk about gray areas and what they don't know if you talk to them one-on-one. And boy, with consciousness, they'll definitely admit that they're kind of lost in many respects.

So I found them pretty candid about that. We would argue sometimes, but they would finally admit, there's a gulf. We can take it this far, but how you get to the conscious subject, we don't know yet.

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Within physics, too, there's these great mysteries. We have this wonderful physicist and oncologist Neil Thieson, and he was explaining to us self-organizing complex systems. It was onto the best episode we've ever had. Any uses the big flock of swallows, right?

If first it appears to be this, but we go closer. Oh, no, it's made up of individual swallows. Oh, well, we go closer. It's made up, actually, of cells. Oh, we go closer.

It's made up of molecules. It's made up of atoms. Every time we get to a lower, more reductive thing, it is revealed there's something yet lower. We still don't know what is below a court.

We're not there. There's still a mystery of-- we're trying to find this quintessential building block for all things. And if we can predict it, then we can model up.

But we don't really still even know what that is. We think we're at this advanced point in science, but in fact, there are these three mysteries that I mentioned earlier.

“And there is this desire to how far down do you go?”

And we're a lot further down than we were 50 years ago. And physicists are very open, I find, about mystery. Biologists, less so, because they have this very stable, intellectual framework called Darwinism and evolution,

and it's been very powerful.

But it may not explain consciousness or it may. And when you start poking holes, you run the risk of getting pushed out of this society. Yeah, I've really been struck by how this work on consciousness has pushed scientific materialism, this idea that you can

reduce everything to matter to a breaking point. And that there are scientists who think it's time for another paradigm. One I interviewed is Kristoff Koch, who is-- his late 60s, German-American guy, brilliant scientist, trained as a physicist actually, but became a neuroscientist.

He's like the Mick Jagger of this community. People aren't enamored with him. Yeah, so many different fields. Yeah, he's a polymath. He ran the Allen Brain Institute and Seattle for years.

He's worked with neurons and probing them and giving them electric shocks and all this kind of stuff. And he was the quintessential brain guy. But over the years, he's kind of come to realize that approach is not going to explain subjective experience.

And we have to look beyond what's admirable about him is he's changed his mind several times. Most recently, he went to Brazil and had five Iowa ska trips. This is how open-minded he is. Yeah, a lot of scientists don't mess around with psychedelics

because they think they don't want to screw up their brain. Yeah, they're money-maker, the money-maker. But actually quite a few of the consciousness researchers are messing around with psychedelics just to get their head out of the box.

Anyway, Christov comes back from this experience in which he saw what he called mind at large, which is to say consciousness outside of his head. It's the same insight that Albus Huxley had in the doors of perception.

He talked about connecting to this universal mind and that the brain kind of channels it and we get a little bit of it in normal consciousness on psychedelics that the valve opens wide and you get a lot more of it.

Christov had a very similar experience and it gave him a crisis. He was crying due his wife. Where does he go with this? And I said, "Well, why'd you believe it?"

'Cause I had my same experience with the plants. And he said, "Well, it was as real as anything "I've ever experienced." Yeah.

And I would never doubt it.

So he's exploring idealism, this idea that consciousness proceeds matter. I admire him because normally science changes as they say, one funeral at a time. You know, people hold on to their ideas to let die.

But he's changed two or three times in his career. So scientific materialism has been this paradigm for like 400 years. It's been very powerful. It's given us a lot.

But consciousness may kind of have reached the edge of it. And I talked to some other biologists too who are considering alternatives to it. And more probably not designed for these concepts to be intuitive.

So I think it's a great time to introduce what was probably the hardest concept of the book. Is it the second law of thermodynamics, entropy? So in a nutshell, correct me if I'm wrong. All matter in the universe.

We have this enormous big bang and everything's been dissipating since. And so all matter will lose its energy. The best analogy is a drop of ink, ink water. And you watch it rip it all out

and then eventually it turns into nothing.

“And that's what everything in the universe is on course to do.”

And the defense of that is to have a boundary. And all things have boundaries. So the cell has a boundary, the cell wall. And animals have scanned.

to recognize the force free energy. And we have to make a decision that protects us from that force, whether it's got too hot, we got to move coal, all these things. And so when you say, maybe there's this consciousness

that is out in the ether, it's contrary to our survival as any complex system fighting entropy. In a sense, our fear is you're not to let things from the outside. And that's dangerous.

You have to let information in, though, because you've got to read your environment. And you have to let food in. But there's a vulnerability every time you open. But that's a very good summary of this idea

of the free energy principle, which is a theory, put forth by English scientist named Carl Friston. It really hurt my head to understand this and explain it I have to say. And I work very hard to make it clear.

“But he's basically saying, life is the way you resist”

the second law of thermodynamics. Until you die, our job is essentially to keep that law at bay. And we do this by creating this wall. It's called the Markov Blanket.

And we have to infer what's going on out there. Because all we get-- we don't get like a picture of the world. We get electromagnetic waves. We get light and sound. We get vibrations.

And we have to construct an image of what's going on out there from that very thin data stream.

It's kind of incredible, we do it.

Highly subjective, I'll just say the book that best explains this as Ed Young's book about an immense world, which is Red isn't read. Red is a 7,000 angstms wave length that we interpret as read.

And another animal does not interpret as read. And that's where science gets off, right? It's like, no, no, there's an objective reality, which is it's a certain wavelength. And then we experience it this way.

When you're getting to consciousness,

“you have to take seriously the human experience of read.”

In fact, it's the only thing that's relevant. And at another way, that's the counterarguments. It doesn't really matter. It doesn't. And it's a fact of nature that humans see this wavelength as read.

So deal with it. Yeah. But so far they don't deal with it. So anyway, this theory is that the way to avoid

dissipating in the second law of thermodynamics

is protecting yourself from it. But also taking actions of various kinds to get food, to avoid negative things. And I found that persuasive. And it gets you from very simple systems to things like us.

It gives you an evolutionary line that you can follow. We are supposed to see ourselves as individual from everything else, because we are trying to protect this little individual being that is protected by this boundary.

So the boundaries are life source. So of course, it's hard to get people to leap into. No, no, but you're still connected to everything. Like the idea.

“That's why it's so hard because it's counterintuitive”

to survival in some way. We are connected. But finally, there is a breach between every conscious being and every other one. Your consciousness is not transparent to mine and vice versa.

And that's part of what makes it difficult to study. And each of our consciousnesses are shaped by every life experience we've had. They're not interchangeable in any way. So we are very separate if you look at it that way.

And to defend ourselves, we need to be on the other hand, we need other people. And so we have to figure out ways to translate consciousness.

And of course, language is the most powerful way we have.

And our consciousness is based on our experience, but also our parents experience and their parents in our friends. Ultimately, if you start doing that, they are all linked. If you really start expanding. As humans, we all have certain experiences in common.

But then we have our own experiences. One of the things that I found very frustrating about the science was they like to say, we're going to explain the qualia as the term for qualitative experience, the redness of red, or the taste of coffee, or the smell of coffee.

You know, these kind of more subjective things. But it's even more refined than that. The taste of coffee to you is different than it is to me, because you have a different relationship to it, built over your whole lifetime.

And that every experience you've had with coffee, every important experience you have with coffee, has left a little furrow on your consciousness. And so they're not interchangeable that way. They're not even interchangeable for your own consciousness

from one year ago. Because you're constantly writing the message. That's right. And you're bringing to bear all the baggage from the past on the current moment.

You've accumulated more baggage over the last year. No thought is the same. You can have the same thought now as you had five years ago, or five years in the future. But it won't be quite the same.

And William James wrote about this beautifully. He said that every thought has around it, or has in halos, and he calls it one point, a fringe of unarticulated affinities. He's just really good at getting at the subtleties

and the specificity of our thought. And that I think is gonna be very hard to understand scientifically. That's where the novelists come in. That's what they describe.

And that kind of brings us to feeling.

“- So all of this scientific exploration really wants”

to focus on the thoughts and the neurons, and it really doesn't care much about feelings. And let's just talk about the history of dividing feelings and thought. - When we first started thinking about consciousness,

we assumed it was this neocortex production, because this is the most advanced, most uniquely human part of the brain and it's this outer covering and it's rational thought and everything.

But it turns out it may have more to do with feelings generated from the body. - So we tend to think that the body exists as a support system for the brain, 'cause we just love the brain

and we identify with the brain. - That's what makes us so unique. - It's that, but also maybe because all our senses are up here or most of them, we just think this is the command center. But in fact, the whole point of the brain

is to keep the body going. And the body has to communicate with the brain and feelings are the way it does it. So you fall out of homostatic balance and you have a feeling, your hungry, your cold, whatever it is.

Or you're in a really good place and you have a feeling of well-being. And all this gets conveyed to the brain. It appears to work at the upper brain stem, which is according to the people who follow this line of research

which begins with Antonio DiMasio and Mark Somes. They've really shifted our emphasis from cortical function to feelings. Only later does the cortex get involved. It does get involved.

So you start with some like incoate feeling of hunger and then the cortex imagines what you might eat and makes a reservation. - Yeah, thoughts come after feelings come first. - And we see this in our kids.

So the brain has to interpret feelings

'cause they're not always clear.

Like I was just at the airport today and there was a kid who was like melting down and the mother was trying to say, "So are you tired or are you hungry?" And you know how kids don't know.

They just feel weird. - Yeah. - Yeah. - And it's uncomfortable. - Or frustrated. And sometimes you just have to feed them something

and they're fine and it's 'cause they haven't yet learned how to accurately interpret the messages coming from their bodies. So this really changes a lot. I think this emphasis on feelings. Basically it says to be conscious,

it's not just a brain and a vet. That's sci-fi idea.

“You need a body and that's gonna have implications, I think.”

- Yeah, I think we have a fantasy that if you keep my head alive, is this body dies and you kept my whole head in a box. - Yeah, I can still exist. - It's crazy, but that's not true.

- Yeah. - And then also this false dichotomy between feelings and thought. It's been framed traditionally in science that feelings are irrational and thought is rational. But as we've studied how the brain operates

and we can watch people make decisions in FMRI machines, we have come to find out that feelings make a lot of quite rational decisions for us. - Got checks. Got feelings.

- The Demasio wrote a book called Dick Hart's Arrow back in the '90s and he demonstrated that people who didn't have feelings because of various lesions in the brain or whatever, made worse decisions than people who had strong feelings

and that the feelings are a way to sort of test out an idea in your body and lead to better decision making,

which is kind of amazing.

Our body is more involved than we think in our thinking. There's an experiment I mentioned in the book that just blew my mind. Give people ginger, have them eat some ginger,

then give them a morally repugnant situation, something that should breed moral disgust. Some people get ginger, some people get a control, placebo. The ones who had the ginger are much less likely

to be judgmental because we feel disgust in our gut. - Oh my God. - Oh my God. - Is that wild? - Yeah, they didn't react as strongly to the morally repugnant situation.

- This is perfect because I wanted to ask you kind of aside from the book with all you've learned. I myself have been wrestling with something for a while now. I don't know if you know Jonathan Hight's moral of founding questions.

- Yeah, I know a little bit about it. - Second hand, yeah. - Probably the most famous one is he asks all of his students so there's a brother and a sister. They take a trip to Europe.

They decide to have sex on this trip in Europe and she can't get pregnant. He covers all the bases. At the end of the trip they said it made them feel closer

and they never had sex again.

Is this morally wrong or not? That would be a great one for the ginger. - Yeah. - I always have thought that the point of that exercise was to force you to work through the fact

that there was no suffering and there was no victim. - No consequences. - And therefore there was no moral issue. And I've landed on that side of it. Even though I would rather cut off my head

than have sex with my own sister, I'm more interested in the notion that maybe that's not what Jonathan's position is. I mean, I need to ask him direct. - Yeah.

“- But I think now, I'm suspicious at least”

that Jonathan's actually arguing that there are things that are morally reprehensible

that feeling of its repugnant sex with your sister

is the right feeling and that that should inform that moral. I don't know, I need to ask him about that. - But I wonder what you think in regards to what I read in feelings. - People who have a low threshold for disgust,

you can predict all sorts of things about their politics. - Yes, he says that a lot. - He talks about that, yeah. That they're more likely to favor authoritarian politics. More likely to be right-wing.

That question you can put people on a spectrum. I don't know exactly why. Is it a stronger moral sense or less tolerance? I'm not sure exactly the reason. But disgust is a very interesting emotion

and it applies to morality and what you're talking about is disgust at the idea of incest. - And by the way, incest is evolutionarily not advantageous. - That's right.

- And you could imagine why we would have evolved a taboo.

- And it is right to trust that feeling, even though you can't find any suffering or victimhood in it. So our intellectual capacity that we rely on so much may not be what we're talking about.

- We're a deeper truth as a foot. I guess that's the truth of the feelings. - It does get tricky and what's scary about it is it opens up the door to a lot of things that we would disagree with, right?

Like I don't think you trust your disgust. - Well it's also saying one way of thinking is right in another way of thinking is wrong. One is logically correct, but morally wrong is tricky. - Well as I'm getting older, like you're on your right.

My right is starting to question, I've been so analytical and so cerebral. And I'm becoming more and more open to there might be another set of truths. - Which is a scary proposition.

“I kind of unravel so much of my cornerstones, right?”

- Yeah, what's prompting that? - Just getting older and less rigid and passionate about being right or wrong. And I guess I'm getting more weirdly curious, but this is a big avenue for me.

Like is Jonathan right about that? - Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I haven't thought about that, but I found my own thinking in the course of this book has changed and that I went from

a kind of conventional frame that you're describing of your younger self of like there's got to be an answer. And I started in this frame which is very kind of Western and I think male of problem solution, hard problem, got to be a solution out there.

And that way of thinking is powerful

and scientists apply it all the time, but it narrows things, right? You're getting one degree and you're putting blinders on to think really hard about that. And my wife, who is an artist, not a journalist,

she was saying as I was reaching these moments of great frustration, like I don't have an answer. She said, you know, not knowing is very powerful. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. She said not knowing opens you up to possibilities,

opens up your imagination and she approaches her canvas as that way every day.

“Sometimes you have to hear something a couple of times”

before it sinks in. And it was only when I went to the Zen retreat that I talked about at the end of the book and I was getting the Zen version of the same message, you know, cultivate that don't know mind

that something kind of clicked for me. And I realized it was another way to think about consciousness entirely. I know what your fear is, Monica, it's mine too. We love it on the left and the most.

I think is when we say, your feelings aren't facts. You know, I'm saying the opposite actually. I'm saying I don't think it's healthy to say one version of morality is wrecked. Sure.

That gets dangerous. I'm pitching for me personally and it's like the other thing might be as relevant. Oh, it is. Not one is superior.

She needs to be trusted. But just while there's a deeper wisdom to this discuss that we couldn't have even known because we don't know about mental and incest and genes. And we don't even know that, but we know it.

I know. Yeah, they're different forms of knowledge. And that is one. Yeah, so I think he's back to feelings.

“I think you said, Renee Descartes would have been more accurate”

to say, I feel there for I am, which I think is really lovely. OK, now let's quickly just get into AI because now we're up to speed on a lot of different thoughts on consciousness. And of course, the pressing issue of the day is will AI

have consciousness. What would that mean roll out your data on that? So I thought hard about this because it's an active conversation in Silicon Valley, near where I live. And there is a general belief in that community

that it's just a matter of time. And there are people working on it. And I follow one group in South Africa that's trying to develop a conscious AI. They want to.

Yes, they want to. They want to. Why? Because they can, maybe. There's an even more extreme view, which

is that what they honor most is intelligence. That's the religion. So if there is at one point, some sentient being that is superior to us, we should yield to it.

But intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing.

They should be disaggregated. Some argue that the reason we need conscious AI is that it will be more compassionate and will spare us.

“I think that's not because member Frankenstein--”

I mean, the plot of Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein gave his monster not just intelligence, but consciousness. And it was his consciousness that made him a homocidal maniac, because he was hurt, by the way,

he was being treated, feelings again. And he was seen in justice. That's right. And other people get hurt. That is reserved to be hurt.

And so he started killing people. So I don't buy that idea at all. So I looked at this question in some depth. And the belief you can make a conscious AI is based-- I think on a faulty metaphor.

And that is the metaphor that the brain is a computer.

Now, if you look through history, whatever the cool cutting-edge technology was at that time, that became what the brain was. So the brain was a mill, a loom, a clock, a telephone switchboard. So we go that way, right? Good technology must be like the brain.

But if you think about it, brains are very different than computers.

“Computers have a sharp distinction between hardware”

and software. They're interchangeable. You can take this software running on any number of different computers. In brains, there's no distinction between hardware and software.

Every memory you have, every experience you have, physically changes your brain. You know how our brains are pruned when we start out with many more connections and growing up is essentially about pruning it in a certain way.

Everyone's brain gets pruned differently, depending on their adverse events and their lives or positive events and their lives. So we all end up with these different brains. And the premise of conscious AI is that consciousness is an algorithm

or a software that you can run on any number of different kinds of material substrates they call it. It just doesn't work. Brains are nothing like computers. Yes, they do some computation,

but they do a whole lot of other things. Other problem with that metaphor is our neurons like transistors. Computers consist of these on-off transistors.

“And yes, neurons either fire or don't fire.”

But they're also influenced by chemicals. They're very analog, actually. And that hormones and neurotransmitters and drugs completely change how they fire or how intensely they fire. So this idea that you can make this one to one comparison,

the consciousness is computation. And then you look at the nature of thought. And you realize there's so much more going on the computation and that our feelings simply information. I mean, they convey information,

but there's the qualitative dimension that you can't digitize. So it's a pipe dream, this idea that we can upload our minds

into Silicon, but it's a powerful belief.

If you switch your model to, know the brains here to support the body, not vice versa, in feelings precede thoughts. They're quintessential to consciousness. I do want to act because I thought this was such an interesting part

of the book. And there are these certain neurons that are in charge of the language of our feelings. And they're very unique in that they travel back and forth across the brain barrier and reach all the way down into the body.

And they are permeable, unlike most neurons that receive an electrical signal that then it repeats, they absorb everything. They have no myelin, which is the insulation on the outside of most neurons.

These ones are just completely naked nerves, picking up information from the body and taking it directly to the brain. It's not a translation of the thing. It's like, I absorbed this now it's here.

It's really powerful. It's so biological. I also think computers are very good at doing cortical things, the hard stuff, right? They do logic and rationality pretty well.

They don't do other things well. A computer can beat you at Chester Go, but you can't use one like change a diaper or do anything involving movement very well. And certainly not doing anything involving feelings.

And the idea that if feelings are necessary to consciousness, how exactly are computers going to have feelings and will those feelings be real? You might design a computer or a robot say that tells you, I'm hot, I need more electricity or something like that.

I need. But will that be a feeling? If you think about feelings, they depend on your vulnerability. They depend on the fact you can suffer.

And perhaps they depend on the fact you're mortal. And without those things, I mean, if you were going to live forever, your feelings wouldn't matter. They would have no weight.

And I think the feelings of machines are just going to be signals. They're not going to have any weight. I love to you talk about so much of humanness and consciousness is about the friction between one another,

the friction between us and nature are environment. And there's no friction in AI. No, and that's been one of the reasons that people believe that they're conscious chatbots. 72% of American teenagers are turning to chatbots

for a companionship right now. We're already way down this path.

can be conscious at one level doesn't matter

because they're going to fool us. Yeah. And they are already fooling us.

“Those relationships, I think, are dangerous.”

For the reason you just mentioned that there's a Sikhophantic that AI's just tell you you're great. It is none of the friction of a real human relationship. They're just service, you or ego. Absolutely.

And why do they do that? They want to keep you online as long as they can. Yes. So they're not real relationships. I think our primate is a might help us here.

This is my only way of the whole is that we are status creatures. That is the great force that drives us at all times. Our hierarchical status. And I don't think you can achieve status with a chat, friend,

a chat, lover, a chat, anything.

Because of the lack of friction. Well, because there's no status in it. The status is that girl's prettier than me. Can I get her? I got her, with me.

I've got status. We just talked about this girl at school was so cool. And she liked Monica. And that is turbocharging for us. It can't give us status because everyone has access to it.

It is an infinite resource. And status is driven on finite resources. As long as we're social creatures, we might evolve out of that. Well, sadly, people are more and more solitary than it works. But I think we're stuck with this.

I'll use hardware, even though we don't like it. I think we're stuck with that. No, I think it goes pretty deep. The status instinct.

“But these relationships, I think, for one thing, we're going to”

atrophy our ability to have real relationships. There's this sociologist at MIT. I interviewed a name Sherry Turkel. And she says this wonderful line at Quote. She says technology can make us forget what we know about life.

And what she means is, when we have a conversation with a machine, we simplify what a conversation is. We take ourselves down to the machine's level. We give up eye contact. We give up body language.

We give up all the sensory connections we make to people as we're doing right now. We're syncing our brains in interesting ways while we talk. And we can signal agreement and disagreement and skepticism. There's old factory signals happening. Yes, so much going on.

But that conversation with the machine is just such a schematic simplified version of conversation. The example I use is when we accepted emojis, this is substitute for emotion. That's the classic example. We're doing it on the computer's terms, not our terms.

In your right, if most of your relationships are frictionless, when you experience just normal friction, it'll feel like aggression and assault. But you set your baseline at a very unrealistic level. In that friction, we learn a lot from it, right? We learn to define ourselves.

We learn to refine our thinking. That friction's really important. Stay tuned for more armchair experts if you dare. You mentioned also friction with nature. These AI's, their world is essentially the internet.

It's not the real world. It's not the physical world. They don't have that kind of contact with nature, with this. And the kinds of people who build these things, they've been living in that computer world since they were like eight playing video games.

And they forgotten that. The internet is not the world. It's like a shadow of the world. I have to remind myself of that. I have to go like, "Oh, right, this thing that exists about me on the internet isn't real."

Oh, my God. Just have an idea. Like, I'm not bumping into anyone at a grocery store that is like, "You beat your wife."

“But there are people online that think that, right?”

And I have to go like, "Oh, right, it exists if I plug the thing in. It's not real." But it's hard to remember. But that's because you're feelings that you're affected by it. I literally happened to me yesterday.

I was like scrolling and then I was like, "Oh, what is this thing about me?" And then it was not good and I was like, "Oh, my God." And it really does take you out. There's a dangerous place to go. I'm like, "Get me out of here."

My journal entry this morning was I'm so disappointed that that still affects me even though I rationally have all of the tools to not be affected by it. Well, I just write to the brainstem that comes back, right?

But it comes here as never going to have that.

They're never going to feel embarrassed. Right. No shame. Yeah. I went to check on how one of our episodes was doing.

And I think 'cause my name's in that episode, it's suggested in the first episode. It's actually the worst person in the world. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Get away from me.

I don't fucking want to see that. That's insane. The worst person in the world. Okay, well, you just tell me quickly about the thought experiment you enrolled in. And I love how honest you are about how terrible it went.

Well, it was like a fun variety of you and talk about the limitations of science. This is a great example. So I heard about this guy who'd been doing the same experiment for 50 years, essentially

Right.

And you have this earpiece.

And at random times of the day, you get this sound and you're supposed to write down what you're thinking. And then, at the end of the day, you have a zoom session with him and he helps you integrate or makes sense of it because it's not clear. And the takeaway is that we really don't know or thinking a lot of the time.

Well, minimally, that was your experience. Yes, I think a lot of people have that. So for example, there's one moment where I had seasoned a fillet of salmon and I was taking it back to the refrigerator and then halfway to the refrigerator, I'm like, shit, I forgot the pepper.

And that was the moment the beep went off. So the thought was pepper. And I was like, oh, that's an easy one. That's pretty clear cut.

“And then Russell, the scientist interviews me after he says, well, did you hear the word pepper?”

Or did you say the word pepper internally? And it's like, I have no fucking idea. Yeah. Yeah. And you realize that you don't know that question.

And then also, are you thinking in words or images? Because sometimes I didn't say a word. I just saw a role. I was thinking of buying this role at the bakery. Anyway, it just put me in touch with the fact that thought is very elusive.

And it's object centric when we study it. Right? That's what the other problems. Right. And it isn't really.

I mean, we name our thoughts for the object of our thoughts like the role or the pepper or but in fact, and this is William James, the great philosopher's psychologist said that

there's never a simple object of thought.

It has all this intonation, association, fanities. We bring to it. It's in a stew. And there are all these things happening simultaneously. And while I was thinking about the role, I was smelling the cheese and the bakery.

And I was looking at the plaid on this woman's skirt. It's all in the mix. So his idea of separating out thought and isolating a thought in the wild. I would just argue with him all the time and say, well, yeah, this was happening too. Yeah.

We have to include this.

“And he was like, well, was that before the footlights of consciousness?”

That was his phrase. And I said, well, footlights, I don't know. But it was there. It was hanging in the wings. We argued back and forth.

And at the end of this whole thing, I do several days. Oh, is this name? Russell Hurber. Very nice guy. He put a lot of time into this.

Two things I want to say about it. His basic discovery after all these years is that we have different styles of thinking. The word thinking is an umbrella term that covers a variety of different styles of thinking. So some people are verbal thinkers, but it's not even a majority.

It's like a third or a quarter.

A lot of people are visual thinkers that they have images, not words. And then there are people who have unsymbolized thought that deny their words or images. I'm not sure exactly what that is. What's happening? Would that be, you think, in concepts?

Yeah. But I still think words. It's hard to imagine your thoughts without a word. Yeah, really. Again, a feeling an emotion could be that.

“So anyway, at the end, I said, so what style thinker am I?”

And he said, well, I don't know what you're going to think of this, but I don't think you have a lot of inner life. What? You want the spectrum of inner experience. Guy ran out of it.

I'm in touch. That's crazy. So thinking was, he said, well, because you could not isolate a thought, you weren't having any thoughts. You were backfilling all this stuff.

Oh. I was like, yeah, yeah. I mean, I roominate. I have an inner life. I shouldn't have to say this.

You got defensive. What I like is you said you were both defensive. You guys both thinker each other's defensiveness. We did. I can't imagine seeing, I'm not a visual thinker at all.

I came and imagined that type of brain. I've talked to people since who are, you know, and they describe what it's like to be a visual thinker. It's really interesting. I am sometimes.

Are you mechanical? No. I'm not particularly mechanical. I don't know. Do you think writers may be mainly art?

I would think it would be words, and it more often is words for me. But a lot of my thoughts are on the verge of being translated into words, they're not yet there. And the writing process is completing that translation. But it's interesting to try this.

And it's something we don't think about, but it's not just what are you thinking, it's how are you thinking it. And as a kind of practice, I found it really interesting. And I stopped sometimes to do that. And I do it in my meditation, too.

I'll think about, well, that thought you just had, could you see it? For here at? And if you heard it, who is speaking it? And I go down this rabbit hole. Yeah.

It's becoming more aware of your thoughts and present in them and exploratory. And yeah, how they're coming to you. That's one of the legacies of this whole project. I was a meditator before I meditate more now. And I spend more time in meditation on those kind of questions, just like watching my thought

process and getting in touch with how weird it is. Our minds are really strange places to visit. Yeah. So often it feels very maladaptive. You're like, why is that the order of events?

It takes me to the wrong place every time I've got to unravel this whole thing, get

I'm really curious. It raises questions about some of these theories of consciousness that this important information is coming up, because our minds are full of bullshit and truth. Yeah. Yeah.

And like, why is that adaptive? One thing I wanted to ask you about, I was wondering while reading the feelings chapter. And I was thinking that yes, our feelings are as important as our more complex cognition, maybe more.

And that your feelings are also in search of homeostasis. So your feelings are predicting when they'll experience discomfort or pleasure. And they're actively trying to buff it against that. I had this thought that your food needs your body temperature needs. These are very simple problems.

Your feelings, trying to maintain homeostasis, not only are there innumerable causes of discomfort, you take something like depression, and I can't think of a more dynamic complex set of variables that you would be trying to evaluate. Is it exercise I do? Is it my diet? Is it this thing? Is it that? Some of the malays of being human has to be our preoccupation with trying to keep our feelings in homeostasis.

Because they're so hard to predict. Yeah. And then I started even wondering how fucked up are we by modern civilization that we have been exposed so much to movies and commercials and all these set points for homeostasis

of your feelings that there's just a million things and that they're being manipulated.

Yes, that you think all of a sudden you need this car for homeostasis and this house for homeostasis and this amount of money and this amount of hair because we're exposed to all these examples of seeming homeostasis for your feelings. Well, the two points to make here, one is I asked these scientists and said, well, I have feelings that aren't necessarily about my body or about homeostatic set points.

What about feelings of shame or guilt? And he said, I think this was Damasio, that, well, there's a homeostasis in your social standing, too. And that if there's a threat to your social standing because you did something shameful or you were disted by somebody, that is a feeling too. And you can feel good when there's an increase in your social standing. So, feelings, there's homeostasis in other realms besides biology. And I thought that was very interesting.

“Yeah, I think shame is the social lubricant of a social primate. You have to experience that”

or you will be excluded from the group and die, right? If you're not aware of the moments when you need to apologize exactly with the people you've offended. So, feelings have a lot of dimensions. In terms of that idea of being manipulated, one of the things I've been thinking about since the book came out and I've been out talking about it is that our consciousness is being polluted, basically.

We have this precious gift that we've been talking about, this private space of

complete mental freedom, our interiority. It's amazing. It's just a great gift.

Can have your fantasies and play out your imagination. There's just so much we can do. But rather than do that, we are scrolling on social media. We are allowing people to monetize our consciousness, basically. And now with chatbots, they're not just hacking our attention, they're hacking our attachment. The ability to emotionally attach to other people, which is so precious and such a precious part of consciousness. And we're getting faked out by these machines.

And I think that gives us certain urgency to the whole subjective consciousness that we need to take steps to protect it and defend it and draw lines around it and say, "Today I'm not going

“to look at social media." You have to regulate it because I also feel like as political beings,”

we need a certain amount of information to act in a democracy. But it's way out of control. Pico Eir says, "You only need five minutes a day to get up to speed on the news. I'm a journalist, it might not be enough for me." I have the theory like, "I learn of the stuff that is important. It gets to you." Someone will say it. But you have to rise in your social freedom. Yeah, you do. And it'll rise to a point of crisis. And that's when you need to know about it.

See, I feel like I'm one of the people who spreads the word. Yeah, that's your own pace. But I don't think it's healthy. So I don't know. I've been giving a lot of thought to how do you protect. And that's one is going on a diet with your media. But what you say about the news

is true for social media, too, because that's really corrosive. We see a million people have the

best vacation of their life. Again, you might have saw one person find an alternate pineapple and you've been in because a few times in your life. But like a thousand times a day, we don't have that capacity. Well, now we don't know if those people are even real. They look like they're having

“the best vacation and they're not even real. They may be synthetic. Exactly. So anyway, I think it's”

telling we all need to think about is how can we nurture that space and not sell it off to the people paying to occupy it? Yeah, it's a very important question right now. Okay, now I have found we've been doing this for eight years. We've gotten to talk to just an embarrassment of riches of

Even these quintessential philosophical debates, they were already been had. A lot of physics finds its way back. Yep. Buddhism. It's kind of beyond comprehension how 2000 years ago, I don't know how long the timeline is. It's not 2000 years. How on earth they came to a lot of so much wisdom. It's really something to behold, isn't it? It is. I didn't expect to end up there. I mean, I'm not a Buddhist, but I got a lot of wisdom from talking to this Zen priestess, Joan Halifax,

who I went to visit in Santa Fe. You pious her retreat center. And I knew her from the psychedelic world in the 70s. She was married to Stanislav Graff and was giving high doses of LSD to

“people who were dying. And we have been on a panel together. Can we see a couple more things about her?”

She's also an incredible human in that she would go on these long retreats to Nepal, right?

She led every year a group of doctors and dentists to go to villages in the mountains of Nepal that have no health care, bringing people and they treat people. That's her life work. Yeah, but she's also worked with the dying and she's worked with people on death row, incredible person. And she's had so many lives and done so many amazing things. And she's 82 now. She just stopped doing the thing. I mean, they were sleeping in below zero temperatures in these mountains and she was right there.

She's wonderful. So I was writing the chapter on the self, the self is an amazing mystery. Buddhist think it's an illusion that we don't really have selves or we only have it in a conventional sense. I'm not sure I buy that, but I was exploring that. And she had said that you pile was a factory

“for the deconstruction of selves. And I said, "That's what I need. I'm going to see how that works."”

And so I arranged to go there. And I was going to interview her about the self. And I should have known that Zen priest would be kind of allergic to concepts and wouldn't really want to participate in the conversation with me. Also, it would be a head of you. Yeah, by a lot.

It's talking about it is maybe antithetical to the whole point. Yeah, exactly. Our first interview

she said something like, "I've divested from meaning." It's like, "Oh shit." What do I do with that as a journalist? But she said, "You're really lost in your head about this." And I think instead of talking to me, you should go live in the cave for a few days. It's a cave. And she has this place, this piece of land, 50 miles north of Santa Fe, and the mountains at like 14,000 feet. She and her monks have dug a cave into the side of a south-facing hillside. And she said, "Why don't you just

be there for a while and think about these questions yourself?" I had the most amazing three days in the cave. No media, obviously. There were not even electromagnetic waves there. It was so remote, no power, and no water. And I got into this ritual where I would meditate it for a few hours a day,

which I've never been able to do before. I'd hike, and I'd chop wood, and sweep, and it's very

interesting to watch what happens to yourself when you have such extreme solitude. And you realize our sense of self is a social construct that we're each reinforcing each other's self. Selfhood as we talk. And if you're not with anyone, it's sort of softens the border we were talking about to kind of really go soft. Really interesting thoughts that you said, like even the notion that no one's gonna come. That's a very, we're never interacts. You're always kind of waiting or

preparing for the arrival or departure of someone. Exactly. And just like taking that off the table, I really was taken by that. Animals might find me, but no one was gonna find me. You're not going to be disturbed. There was a great freedom in that. You can really let your mind go. And what I came out of it with was this idea that I've been so focused on this problem solution frame and that if I let myself go and to not knowing what we were talking about earlier, it opened me up to

being present. And I realized how much of the time we're not present. And you know, we think we're more conscious than animals, but actually animals have to be more conscious because if they're not present to their environment, to what's going on right now, they can be eaten. They can't afford to be lost in a memory from three years ago or shame. Exactly. The construct of civilization and technology has allowed us to get kind of lazy about presence and consciousness. And that came back to me.

I really felt it. And I realized this is something that distinguishes humans that we have the freedom to not be here. And sometimes that's great. And it allows for some human achievement that we can imagine in an alternative world. But day to day, we're giving up something really precious.

“I think a lot of people at the same reaction, I had like I'm going through it with you. She”

marches you up here and like, okay, you're going to be here for you if it is. And my first thought is I'm going to be so uncomfortable with my thoughts. It's going to be maddening. And I love she explained, everyone will go through this. You'll ruminate and you'll ruminate and finally you'll be

bear to watch this fucking movie again. Yeah. The reruns. The reruns. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So like that happened to you. Yeah, I got there. And that happens in her retreat center. She said people meditate for two weeks and then they drop in. But a couple things lead to that. Because I asked her, how do you

destroy selves or undermine self? And she said, well, first, no, I contact and no speaking. So

even if you're with other people, they're not reinforcing your sense of self. The other thing is

“ritualized. All your behavior becomes ritualized. And you have to do this. You have to serve food”

in a certain way. You have to walk in a certain way. And ritual relieves you of individual volition. You're following a script in a way. You don't have to evaluate either. Exactly what you're doing. Just what we do. Yeah. Times a big element too, right? That release stuck with me. That was something that occurred to me when I was out in the cave, which is I was very present. I was in the moment a lot of the day doing my chores. You would sleep. You cut wood. Yeah, dug pit toilets in the

woods and cut wood. I'd make a cup of tea now and then had a little camp stove. You realize that ourselves are constructed out of our memories and our future goals. And without that time line, we're gone. And there are people who can't remember anything and they have no sense of self. So our sense of self is a very interesting construct. Continuous. It's very tenuous. And our attitude to it is so paradoxical because we want our kids to have self-esteem and self-confidence

is important and self-assurance. Yet we spend a lot of time trying to escape it. In meditation, in experiences of all in nature, in psychedelics, transcending self, these are some of the high points of a life. And it's interesting that both are true and selves are useful. We need our ego, but the ego builds walls. And when the walls come down, you can really connect to something larger than yourself. I was imagining that when you saw this herd of elk come eat in the

meadow after this kind of deconstruction and the loss of time. And I was thinking that had to be

so pleasurable and exciting. And exciting. Like you reset your baseline from all this incredible

exciting noise we're surrounded by. And I can imagine after like two days of abject boredom going like, "Oh, yes, this is the show of the century." And what a lovely thing to be experiencing joy in the pleasure from. It was great because nothing was happening and then suddenly there they were. So the only part where I thought, how could this have happened to you is the writer part, as much as you were shaking all this stuff. You had to be aware of that you were also needing

“to commit the experience to memory so that you could later write about it. What was that tension like?”

I didn't take any notes. I just wanted to experience it. And at the time, I didn't know I was experiencing the ending of my book. I mean, I have another starians. Yeah, so much happened to me in the last five years that isn't in the book. I didn't realize its significance till some time later. And with the help of my editor, by the way, that passage was going to be the end of the self-chapter. And then I realized, "No, this is the end of the book."

I mean, I do lots of things in full knowledge that I'm going to write about it, including some of the psychedelic experiences I had. But in this case, it was possible, but I didn't like document it. I have a couple pictures. That was the only documentation of the cave. It's funny that Cave almost sounds like prison. And again, circling back to like you get to make the choice. You get to make the choice whether that's a pleasurable or meaningful experience.

It could have been horrible, yeah. It could be considered torture. It required suffering, though, as most good things do. Yeah. There is discomfort at the beginning of that. There was. And I didn't know that I could handle it. I'm not a camper. It's like not my thing. And I have this whole experience with the pit toilet that I mentioned of peeing into my sneaker by accident. And I'll go that well. But I'm glad I did it. It was way out of my comfort zone.

And so the last big philosophical question I have for you is, you teed her nicely, in my opinion, throughout the book, in your belief and trust in science. And then there's something going on as well. I can't help but think back to the like the moral them found anything. Somehow something in this Buddhism was discovered, some crazy wisdom. And do you feel like it

“at all realigned what the goal is? I think we've been so helpent for the last 400 years of”

figuring out how everything works. Yeah. And in pursuit of that, we've lost the experience of

the working of it. My analogy is always, you could spend your day at Disneyland trying to figure out

how pirates of the Caribbean works mechanically. Or you could be on the right. That's a good analogy.

out how it works. But we have it. Yeah. And you could miss it. And many of us miss it all over the tunnel. Oh, the fucking magic trick works. Yes. So I closed my toolkit and that whole investigation

“and I got on the ride. And that's what happened in the cave. Yeah, yeah, that's great. That's great.”

I loved it. You can't help but check in with where you stand on all this as you're learning more and more about it. And then the best thing about it is it makes you more curious and it implores you to ask more questions and to consider. I hope it helps people become more conscious.

It's very simple. And to use this and practice this amazing gift we've been given.

It's an older person's game. Do you think a little bit? Yeah. Yeah. I thought about that too. Again, people shouldn't get to this point. They got to build their thing and buy their house and have their kids. I mean, they're certainly the world we live in. The interesting consciousness as you age has something to do with there's this kind of subliminal subtext to consciousness, which is it's a secular substitute for what we used to call the soul. One of the things about the

soul is it's indestructible. And the idea that we have something that seems to transcend matter part of us are hoping it'll transcend our mortality. Yes, definitely. I have no reason to believe that's true. But if it defies all the rules we have of matter and second law of thermodynamics, I think people harbor that wish. And obviously that wish becomes more urgent to the older you are. Yeah. And I think we agree. I don't believe there's an indestructible soul. And I believe there's

something much bigger going on. I have a much more open mind than I did going into this. I started as a kind of died in the wool materialist. I've seen it work in so many areas, reductive science in its power. And I came out of it thinking, well, it could be very different. Michael, this was a delight. I'm so flattered. You come and sit with us. Oh, I'm so happy for the opportunity. Yeah, you're so fun to have in the world. Yeah. It would be shining arts on different things.

Oh, thank you, guys. I doubt you're going to lead another revolution like psychedelics based on this,

“but my fingers crossed. I think it would be. Can you answer the question for the cave now?”

No, I mean, all I was thinking is like, can you introduce me to this woman? I must have this experience. She's great. Should I have her on the show? Oh, that would be great. Talker. She's got great stories. Somebody told me who was I saw last night. Rebecca Solnett, I don't know if you know the writer. She'd spend time in the cave too. She said she was terrified most of the time about bear. Yeah. I was like, God, I'm glad I didn't think about bearers.

But she said that she thinks they should charge $10,000 a night now as a fundraiser. Stay in the cave for $10,000. I like that. Yeah. All right. We'll be well. I hope everyone checks out a world appears a journey into consciousness. There's a lot of GC science. There's a lot of GC woo woo.

It's all there. It's all going to be talking about this one first. Thank you, guys. Thank you.

When y'all be going, join this episode. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes. Well, how are you? How was your weekend? I weekend. What? You hosted a birthday party. I did. I took, I've taken two bats since I saw you. Oh, wow. Okay. They've been great. And in their night late pretty much. Now, it's been trying to be.

“Well, I don't think you're supposed to take your bubble bath. You get your bubble bath?”

Yeah. It's not a good bubble bath. I'm not going to say the brand because it's bad. Is it Barney's bubble bath? No. Okay. Is it Barney the dinosaurs? Is it blueberry bubble bath? No. These are just names of bubble baths. I think it would be cute. Good names for bubble baths. Yeah. No. This is, and it's a kids bubble bath because I, oh, it bouncing baby bubble bath? No, because I think they make the best bubble baths because most babies like bubble baths.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, they're not even vocalizing anything, but we assume they do for sure. And we do like to fill it up with suds. Well, I used to, when I used to do bubble baths, I used to use honest. Okay. Brand bubble bath. And it was great. It made great bubbles. Yeah. But they didn't have it at the store that I was at. So I bought, I think it's like organic. Oh, no. Anything. It makes no bubbles.

I'm all about organic for food. I mean, when I say all about, I would pick it over none.

If, if given the choice, but never when it comes to cleaning products. Okay. So this is such a ding ding ding

You know me. I like a dawn or duh. I like all the harsh chemicals for the, um, this. So it's imperative. So this is a big ding ding ding because a couple days ago, you know, I have my new dish washards so exciting. I love it so much. Yeah. And I use a classic dish, dish washer detergent.

environment, whatever. It is a don't they disintegrate? I don't know. Okay. They said she recommended it.

“She was like, even though it's like bad. I don't know if it is. She knows stuff. I think those disintegrate”

entirely. Okay. Well, anyway. So I have that. And then I was listening to a podcast that I've, I don't know how it happened. I started listening to this podcast and I have been listening so much. And it really, it's got, it got me. Okay. Got me. And one of the girls on the show starts talking about dish washing detergent and how bad it was like, can you believe we used to use this brand? And that's just like, and then we're eating off of that. Like, that's so much chemicals. And I

started to panic. Okay. Um, and I was like, fuck, I pretty sure that's the brand I used currently.

Yeah. Yeah. And then I know someone who knows this girl. Uh, it's twice removed. Yeah.

There's a little, they've got to keep that with a grain of salt. I asked my friend to ask this girl, what her detergent is that? What's the clean detergent? Well, you're really quick. You're saying, you know someone that was knows the person on the podcast. Yeah. Okay. My question would be, could you show me the study that showed, like, where's your evidence for this claim? Okay. I'd love to know clearly someone educated her on that. And I'd go, I want to know where you read that,

where I need to read this to see if this is real. Well, that's, yeah, the difference between you and I. I was like, what's the clean detergent? Okay. Um, this person is very into clean living. So then

my friend sent, she asked and she sent me the thing and I said, oh my god, that can't be that. I just

poured that all over my bath. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very gentle. Not my bubble. In my bubble bath, I put the bubble organic bubbles and then also this soap to get clean. Yeah. And I'm like, this is what's being used in the dishwasher. That's not going to clean anything. That's not even cleaning my body really. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. So I've gone back. Okay, back to my, I accidentally grind. Okay. Um, a lot of things sound intuitive. So you believe them immediately

without any evidence. It's like, seed oils are bad. You know, many people are berserk about seed oils. There's zero zero evidence. Right. There's nothing. There's no big meta, data study to say that they're bad for uniquely bad for you. But it's intuitive. So people are just like, yes. So it's like, I want to know the study where someone study people who ate off those plates and people who didn't and what their health outcomes were to make a claim like that.

Well, they're probably also just looking at the box and seeing the chemicals that are in there. Yes. This is the chemicals that are not in the other ones. It feels intuitive to say chemicals are bad.

“Well, I think if some people are choosing, they're like, I'd rather probably pick one that”

doesn't have all this stuff in it that I don't even understand. I don't know how to read. I don't this all made up stuff. And this has be honey. Yeah. You know, that which has a bunch of scary chemical compounds. If you, they were listed in a, you know, like a a cautionary video. Right. I either lane Norton post. I was telling you about where he got me all rattle. But it was just like different chemistry for water and all these other supplements, you know, all these other

things that are completely fine. Okay. Well, I just looked up is this brand bad for you. It says this brand is generally considered safe for uses directed. No to that ingredients are vetted for safety. However, some users and critics suggest it may be less than ideal for those hanging non-toxic options as it contains benzo triazzle, dyes and fragrance. And then there's some other links or yeah, I don't know. I, I'm, look, I would prefer it be natural. But I,

I prefer more that it works. That it functions. Yes. So because at that point, just don't buy any product. Just run them raw with some water. Yeah. You know, so then you get into what's in the water. You will you have chlorine in the water. I know, but I also don't agree with you necessarily that

“it's all or nothing. I think you do like little, you know, it's like this is preferred to this.”

Well, I'll probably do that. And yeah, I'm not like erasing. I'm not going to be so pure. Yeah, I don't, you could go, I don't have an all or nothing to bait here. What I'm suggesting is that things that are viral on podcast and Instagram and social media are often things that there's no

made. Yeah. It's like all the people that are terrified of vaccines because you, if you put in there,

“it had for meldehyde. And that's very scary. But what they don't tell you, your body makes for meldehyde.”

So it's not, you know, any who, any who, so I'm back on that. Okay, you're back to your normal detergent. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It means in that hard stuff. How is car? You hosted Charlie's birthday party. We could only come for a half hour. Yeah, you guys came. Yes. So well, it was a surprise party that got spoiled. So then it once that got spoiled, the plan shifted. And it was drinks and hang at my house and then walk over to Cara for dinner. And you get, yeah, you guys stopped by before we walked

over to dinner. And it was so nice. They had us in the back in a big circle table. And it was so enchanted

in the same area that the little looking glass pool is. Yes, but all the way in the back. Yes,

and it was this big round table. And it was, it was so charming. Okay, I know you are a little bit against round tables because you don't like round objects. I visually don't like them functionally around tables the best. It's perfect. Yes, absolutely. Then there's no one stuck at the end that can't talk to you. Yes. And ever, and I was really feeling that. I was like, oh, we're all in the con though at all times. So nice. There's a sacred circle. Yeah. And I have a round table at my new house.

Yeah, yeah. I do round tables actually. One in the dining room and one small small one in the kitchen. Okay, yeah, yeah. And the one in the dining room is as memorable. It's enormous. Yeah. Well, it's a dining room table. I mean, it's a big boy. I mean, you got how many people can get around a 12? Uh, sure, six aside. Oh, definitely six. No, aside. I don't think it's a big boy. Yeah, it's nice. Um, you could put out on it this way. I'm going to help people visualize it. You could put

out on it. I'm going to say six large pizzas, five in a circle touching in the one in the center. And I think what accommodate six large pizzas? I think that large. Yeah, large pizzas. Yeah,

“like 18 inches. Oh, I don't know. That's tested out. You have to buy five. No six. Six.”

Six. Six large pizzas. Anyway, it is. But I, I was filled with gratitude that I had a circular table after this circular meal because, oh, my god, Monts giving, I mean, that everything's wide open now for hang. Now, I won't make an argument for there's a time and a place for the long rectangular table, which is quite often, like, I'll say a Nashville. Sometimes we have, I think there would be 16 people sometimes in the house, right? You were there. No, you weren't there. Thanks,

giving, have that many people. And so additionally, it's nice to be able to choose your pocket a conversation. So it's like, let's see, the gals want to talk about this, but the boys want to, they're playing, you know, we want to go on the lake and do something. So, in that way, you can compartmentalize everyone together, but also you can have compartmentalize. Yeah. If it's a habitual eating space. Yeah, that's good. Like, I don't know that every time I eat, I want access to every

single person. Oh, my god. I actually think that's wrong, but not morally, um, logistically, because in a round table, you can, you can turn and, like, have, like, a little one-on-one side-y. Yeah. And then you can immediately make it about the group. If you end up next to someone you don't want to be next to at a, at a rectangle or square, even? No, mainly a rectangle. Yeah.

“That's, that you're locked in. That's a bummer. Yeah, you got to sit where you, you need to. But”

you don't always have control. People do swap seeds. That's true. People pull up chair. Like,

the round table gets you out of some situations. It does. But, uh, all just that, you also could be next to somebody at a round table, like, constantly keep trying to make it a sidebar. You've had that experience. Yeah, I mean, like, what is the table? I can't stand that when you're with a group, clearly everyone's trying to talk and someone keeps trying to make it a sidebar. Yeah. I don't like that. Like, let's go out just for coffee, you and me, but like, we're here with a big

group. Let's not sidebar the whole thing. I understand. I agree. I agree. I don't like, I actually don't like when we're all in a big group. And to some small subset is just being a subset or sidebaring. I'm like, guys, we're all together. Let's get around table. Be respectful. So car was great. To people, some people hadn't eaten there ever before. Yeah, I had what I was enchanted. Okay, great. We were only able to come for half hour because we had the most action pack Saturday. My brother and sister and

it was it was one after another. It was get Delta to the 930 interview at her new school.

And then that was followed by a meeting with somebody in their son. Mm-hmm. And then that was followed by how Mary, have you seen it? I've not seen it yet. I do want to see it. I'm so delighted. That movie opened to $80 million. I couldn't be happier. It's in a original movie. Yeah. We love Lord and Miller. It's not a franchise. It's not IP. It's a original concept. Well, it's a book. Fine. Well, it's not a superhero movie. It's not Tonka's or branded IP. Yeah. So the fact that

it opened at like superhero movie money is so good for film. Yeah. It's awesome. I'm excited to see it. It's so good. Comedy show at night 8 p.m. That we had gotten tickets for my brother and my sister and love. And us Chad Kruger. Do you know, you know, Chad, what up council? Yes. Well, I didn't

actually, but at the round table, they were talking about him. You had never seen one of his videos.

“I think I have actually, once they were describing him. He's hysterical. People should go to his Instagram.”

He goes to lots of city council meetings and he argues for really preposterous new legislation. So generally raised stoke or chill, something in the community. He thinks that could make it more stoker, more chill. Uh-huh. Sure. He thought that like there's nothing that makes you more stoke or chill than hanging on a yacht. And he thinks there needs to be public yachts. So that everyone could experience that level of stoke. I don't disagree. He's great. Just the way he talks to them.

What up council? Um, so he had a woman show in the premise was it was a seminar, like a Tony Robbins

seminar on how to reclaim your stoke and it had a meditation and it had worked from volunteers in the audience. It was spectacular. Yes. If you get a chance to go see him, I highly recommend it.

“Cool. Yeah. I regret to inform you. Okay. I think my days might be numbered.”

Okay. Any planner? Yeah. Okay. Um, something very bad happened. What? So few days ago, it's trying to be responsible. Mm-hmm. Instead of ordering food, I decided, I'm going to cook tonight. Yeah. I ordered a chicken to cook. Yeah. Cooked it. Rose chicken, whole chicken. Not, not time consuming. Yeah. Yeah. You know, that's an endeavor. Cooked it. It's about so good. Hold it out. Interesting. It has kind of some weird

color juices. Mm-hmm. But that's probably maybe just the audience. Yeah, pink. But I knew was cooked through. How did you know that? I have a meat thermometer. Okay. So I knew it was cooked through. So I was like, yeah, what's with these? But maybe it's just the red onion. I had cooked it with black. Mm-hmm. Okay. Then, um, I go to carve it. I let the bag, the bag of jiblets in there. Oh, fuck. I cooked the whole thing with the bag. Uh-huh. And I was so

disco. I was so disgusted. Yeah. But also... Hungry? Yeah. Hungry, hungry. I was like, could it be fine? Like, they're in the cavity. It's not touching the meat. Yeah. So it's a good bag. Yeah. It's weird. Well, it's hard for me to not think of a thing that we were nervous about. Yeah.

“Yeah. Well, that's why my days are numbered because so then I googled,”

can you still eat it if you accidentally cooked it? And it said, it kind of said, maybe. Okay. So if there's, if there's a hole in it, it'll not. It's a middle path. Yeah. And it said, try a little piece and see if it tastes severe. Like plastic and jiblets? Yeah. So I did try a little piece. And I'm actually shocked at myself that I didn't any of this. Yeah. I'm so wasteful. You'd think, but I was hungry. And I was like, you're really bored. Yeah. Yeah. And so I did try a little

piece. And then I was like, I actually do think it tasted fine. Yeah. But I got very freaked out. And then I looked at the bag and there was a hole and I was like, I'm dead. I'm dead. I ate this one piece. I'm dead now. A big of a piece. Oh, China. A couple ounces of meat. Like this big. I'm off of the breath. Um, I just told a piece off. I'm sure. I don't know. I just, I was acting out of like, I don't know. Like fight or fly or something. It was a small, small piece. But I did eat

did have a hole in it. And I was like, Oh, my God. What was their fear with the hole that the jiblets

“are poisonous? Probably the plastic. Yeah. And was the plastic and when I was in there?”

Like a little boy. I mean, I roasted it up for 50. Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare. So that was bad. It was a small small piece of like, you're fine. I think that's my verdict. You're completely fine. I think I'm fine. It's just, it's, it's it is really funny. It's funny timing for the story. Well, by the way, that happened before the detergent. Yeah. Okay. Maybe you're on a tail. Yeah, I might have been influenced. Okay. Um, but it was really

a one to punch. It's like, oh my god, I'm, I'm already, I've already lost probably a substantial amount of years because of that chicken. Yeah. And now I'm finding out, I may have lost, I'm losing years

by the second with this blank detergent. Yeah. Um, and you know, I guess I was like, that's,

it's over. It's over. Yeah. My life. And it was, it was, it was a good one. It was a really good one. It was a good one. No famine. Yeah. No torture. Definitely no famine. To have already dug my hole this episode, so it's going to dig it a little deeper. Oh, fun. I do not question at all that there are microplastics in our body. That has been observed. There have been studies. It has been observed. But there hasn't been, is any study that can

demonstrate whether it's good or bad to happen in your body. It's there for sure. Right. But we're not sure yet what it means if it's anything could mean nothing could be totally poisonous. I mean, the heart for me believe it's totally poisonous because we all are saturated with it. But all to say, we simply are not there yet where we know what impact it's going to have. Yeah. Yeah. Let's write. What are the six inches deeper in my hole? I don't know.

You'll be proud of me though. Wait. We can know a philosophical conversation. I know we're on the verge of it. What do you want to ask? You want to ask what, why do I care? I just, I don't want to ask that. I just, I'm like, I don't care that you care. Obviously. I mean, I want you to have like all your

“convictions and I want you to do the church. I want you to do whatever you want. Yeah. Yeah. I think you”

know. And also because I don't actually, I'm not a big toxins person. So this isn't budding up against any real thing of mine. I just, you know, it's running deep like you're not approaching it with like this, like I don't care. Like you care. Yeah. I think people, I think social media has made people panic about a ton of stuff. I know. That's a waste of time in energy. I know, but it's not wasting your time in energy. So I guess for me, I'm like, who cares if they care? Like, you know, let me

consider that. Is it, is it impacting me? No. Yeah. I guess everyone's allowed to. I mean, other than I live with someone who's pretty concerned about all this stuff. And so sure my own life gets, um, I don't want to see this organized. I'll say reorganize quite often and there's new things we use and things we don't use and any updates on paper. No black plastic in the house. Oh, that study was flawed. Okay. We can have black plastic. So I guess in that lens, first of all,

but also who cares? Yeah. When I can't have the black plastic, which I'm, there's also some know it on this. I guess I go with it. I go with it. Um, because white plastic works, too. So let

you know, the point I was going to say is, yeah, I'm never like looking for a vessel to add water,

too, and I have no option. Right. Exactly. Why don't you just keep someone in your on your in your on your. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But yeah, black plastic and paper plates covered in plastic. Yeah, it's just a drop of plastic. I just throw it in there. What if, what if it started everything

“and they're just started like crumbling up and turns out you should never have had those. Yeah.”

You're right. I don't, it doesn't affect me. I don't know. I care. I guess I hate seeing, again, and why do I, why do I hate seeing it? I hate seeing people chase all these really fringe things. While ignoring all of the really obvious stuff that's been proven, resoundingly empirically. I know, but it's like exercise and your diet and stuff. And it's like you're some people are really hyper focused on these. And then they go out and drink or they

smoke cigarettes. Yeah. But again, that's, that's sort of my take away is like no one, I think people

counter it in some other way. I think it brings me joy because they can control that one.

It's like, here's this list of things that could be controlled that would make you healthier. In this group of them are very hard to control. And this one's easy. I want them at the store. I picked this box for that box. Yes, sure. Yes. So it's like a sense of control. Well, but it's all, there is also vices. It's like, I'm choosing this vice in life. I'm going to have some. I'm choosing this. Yeah. And I am going to choose other. Try to offset that with this other

thing. Sure. Yeah. I mean, because I guess you could, I could say, like, well, I'm drinking. So I'm not going to exercise. Like, that's already fucked. You know? I guess it was the tone in which you

explain. She's like, I would never use that. You shouldn't use that detergent. It's like very

“preachy. I guess she, to be fair, she didn't say you should it. Oh, okay. She just was saying she was talking”

to her friend. Yeah. Her boyfriend. And she was just like, can you believe? Basically, can you believe I've been doing this or that we that we. Yeah, but she meant we are in the other person. Okay. It's fought. Like, I didn't feel ashamed. I felt scared. I know. That's that's the impact of that. But, but ding ding ding. You're going to be proud of me. Okay. I used my Jimmy yesterday. Oh, great. What'd you do? I lifted weights. Nice. How to feel? What kind of movements did you do?

Those were. I did rows. I did squats. Like cable rows or bent over bent over the bench.

Oh, great. Which is so great. Yeah. And I did. What size dumbbells were you doing your rows

with? Eight. Eight. It's okay. Well, it's a good start. It's a good start. It's a good start. Because I I've lost a lot of muscle mass and I got to gain it back. You got to get it back. Okay. Yeah. Any muscles? Um, I'm sore. Go. It did do something. Yeah, great. I did squats. I did. Okay. Now, I have this machine. Uh-huh. I'm not exactly sure how to use it. Yeah. And I did use it. And I'm not sure if I used it. Right. Did you keep getting nervous at home? Could see you

using it wrong? No. Oh, that's good. You felt like you had totally. I did. I did have anonymity.

“But I felt like what if I'm doing like damage or the opposite thing of what I'm trying to do?”

It's very possible. Yeah. So I had, you know, those, like, pleas. Uh-huh. I use that. Those. To do what? I'm scared to talk about it. How come? This is like me coming to you to ask about gymnastics. I know. I shouldn't have any. I don't know about gymnastics. I know. And you don't know about weightlifting as smart as you are. So, I mean, and I happen to do it pretty often. Okay. So I like used it as

pulled down. That's right. Pulled down. Do you add an angle? Right. So I was leaning. You're probably splitting the difference. So you probably want to go directly down to get your last. Okay. Or you want to do straight out to get your back. I know, but you can move them up and down. Uh-huh. They have little yellow hooks on the bottom. You pull those out. You slide them up and down to make them any height you want. Okay. So if you're doing it straight out, you're getting

your back. Right. If you're doing it straight down, you're getting your lats. If you're doing it at an angle, you're splitting the difference. You're kind of not getting a great isolated of either. You're getting kind of a mix. So it's not wasted. You're still having to use your muscles. Okay. In your muscles, I'll tell you if you're doing something wrong. Yeah, I knew I wasn't. Actually, I didn't know I wasn't doing damage. I just didn't know if I was doing anything.

Yeah. So there's a more efficient way and a more productive way to tackle those two different groups. And yeah. Okay. And I did some abs. And that was it. How long was the whole routine?

“Probably 20 minutes. Okay. Great. Great start, Monica. Yeah. What, you don't sound, you should sound”

brought to yourself. Yeah. What's the disappointment? No, there's no disappointment. It was, it was it better than your work out the day before. Yeah. But the day before that, I did like walk through. I just walked through the gym and I was like, you know what? And then I did some squats and then I did some planks and then I kept walking. Yes. So it was better than you improved. Yeah. I improved. Yeah. And your next trip you'll probably improve. We'll see. Yeah. You will.

And then I had my creatine. Okay. It did feel better to have creatine after I worked out. Uh-huh. It felt a little more like I earned it. But then I have a bonus. Oh, interesting. Exactly.

plastic chicken. And this was the day I was very healthy. No drinking, workout, creatine. Wow.

“Protein, diarrhea. So duck duck, diarrhea. I just, I don't love the way that went.”

Yeah. Do you think the workouts related to the diarrhea or the creatine? Because the creatine I have heard can bear can upset your stomach. But I've been on it and it hasn't.

It's maybe only because your stomach is after workout. It's never upset my stomach. I've been out

for ten years and I know it's on a people that are on it and I've never. But I know someone who is on it who said that. It's not like it's this is a real person, not from a podcast. And then two people actually that I know women. Okay. I also had go Greek yesterday. Okay. So I am also on my period which really can mess up your whole system. Sure. So I actually think it's probably that. Okay. Okay. Let's do some facts. Okay. Last night as I laid with Delta, we listened to a lot of

sederous, so fun. I love that I have an excuse or a reason because it's a good part of my

mental high chief. They'll listen to that clever man tell stories. You know, he's describing. He

takes out these weird vacations when he's in France for a month and then he's in England for a month. And then he has this friend, this woman who's American but she's a tour guide in France. And they like to take these one day trips. They want to say they've stayed everywhere. Uh-huh. And he does not want to see any museums or anything historically. He just wants to go shopping in these places. Yeah. I got it, I can relate. Yeah. And he's relieved himself. I'm dying to go shopping with him.

You guys should really try it. Like, I wanted to go on a walk with him. I wanted to do that. You

should go shopping with him. Yeah. I could hand him off to you. We could take a walk and then I could

dump him off. Yeah. But he like flea markets and shit. I do too. So he was going all over the former, you go slavia. Okay. And he was describing it. And I was, you know, he has this bizarre freedom that a lot of people don't have. Yes. For numerous reasons, every time we've interviewed a week and week, I try to figure out what the ingredient is that, that, that, that immaculates him from this. But I was thinking like, he is describing exactly what he's seen. Mm-hmm.

And it's terrible. You know, it's just terrible. The conditions are fucking terrible. Yeah. And then I was just thinking that we've gotten into this phase where it's like, you can't say anything as terrible out of fear of insulting whoever lives there or that it has some built-in colonialism or Western superiority or whatever it is. And it's like, but some, some places, you still need to be described as they are. Okay. I'm going to, I'm going to not push back,

“but flip the coin. Yeah. So yeah, I think so. You're like, how are you like not like,”

or in a world where you can't describe anything? You see, how does anyone inform themselves about what the place is before they would go there? But let's say someone said a trailer park was terrible. I think you wouldn't like that. No, I, I think the distinction is, are you saying the people are terrible people? No, no, no. Then you got problems. Yeah, yeah, but the place. Most trailer parks, the ones that I was in nonstop were fucking terrible. They were just drunk adults fighting in the

fucking dirt road in front. Right. There was chaos. It was like, you know, it's over indexing in every single depravity because it's, it's, it's, it's poverty in poverty against addiction. But if I, like, that would be a realistic assessment of what it is. Okay. So that's sort of my point, but I, because you can't say that either. You can. I can, yeah. I could say, you did. But I can't say that. That sounds bad. I think what the distinction is, and it's like, no, you can. What, what you can't

do is say like, these people are backwards or they're primitive or they're stupid or they're, that's the part where like, you know, you're, you're getting to your superior person. As if you live there, you would act differently or I've been raised there, you would definitely. So, but the, the place objectively has X amount of fights and X amount of alcohol consumption,

“X amount of fires. Yeah. And I find, like, that reality should, you should be free to describe that.”

I guess, I mean, I think you can describe it, but I think most people, if you publicly said,

And I can see why, even if you're not saying anything about the people, if you are someone, you're making a great play. It's, it's, I love it coming from Aaron, who's raised almost exclusively

in trailer park. Yeah. More than I would. Me. Well, I would never say it. Susan Sarandon.

Well, I'm not a voter background. I was trying to go to someone I know. Uh, um, a great comedian who was, what took a limousine this cool every day. Oh, Nicole. Nicole. Yeah. Like, obviously, I think Aaron's saying he's more entitled to say it than Nicole is. Exactly. Yeah. That's a great counter. But also like, we need realistic accounts of what things are. Yeah. Let's just leave it to David Sedaris to do it. Okay. That's a lot of what happens when we

lose them. Oh, I guess someone will take over. Fuck. Yeah. That's going to be a bad. The other funny thing it brings up in there is, you know, he has his driver, he's hired a driver, taking all these different places. So so so much of their dialogue, he is written down. And it's just trying to lighten the fact that like how many times I've been places and you have a tour guide. And you kind of assume they're telling you the truth. Like that they actually know

“the history of the place. Yes. But the truth is people don't really know the history of any place.”

If you take a tour was anyone in LA and they start telling you facts about LA, they're probably

wrong. Yep. And like, so this guy is telling him that Yugoslavia had the third piece on the world

and all this stuff. You know, it's like propaganda from the Soviet era that he's distributing his facts. And then it just made me go through so many of the times I've been with a tour guide and I'm just hearing all these facts and you're just going to take in them. But you don't really ask yourself, like, how much, what's your average peer know about any of this stuff? Who's driving an Uber? Because that's all it is. Like we took a tuck tuck ride, Lincoln and I through Lisbon.

This guy was drop and facts on us like every 12 feet. But he was not a historian and he was in a professor or a teacher. I think it also depends on, well, because like we went, we had an actual professor. The one in it, right? And I believe everything she said. Yeah, but I've had what if she was other ones in Alaska, the guy driving the bus. Right. But how can we tell what it's like, I don't know, just because she's a professor. I trust her. It must trust experts

“more than lay people on their area of expertise. You have to trust a neuroscientist more about”

brains than you do a car mechanic. It's who being sane to not to. Wow, I'm glad you said that. I'll definitely be bringing that back later. Is that a car mechanic? Yeah. I would that's so funny brought that up. Because when my parents were in town, we were driving down the street. My mom said, remember when we came, I was like 11 when we first visited LA. She said we went on that tour and I was like, oh my God, nothing on that. I'm sure nothing is like a star maps tour. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Good point to any money. Any money? We and you believe it and you're excited. I should get a picture of it. So really does the truth matter? Well, that is the topic in many regards of Michael Pollen's book. Consciousness. Yeah. He's understanding it. The important part or is experiencing it. Yeah. Exactly. Great interview. He's so good. Yeah. He's just so interesting. Yeah, a few sweater. I thought you weren't. You're not wearing a sweater. I know, but I thought I

was. I thought it was a compliment. Okay. He said, well, we talked about disgust and how you can kind of understand people's politics. Like, there's a lot of political affiliations are associated with disgust. But I think we may have flipped words. I'm not exactly sure. Discuss sensitivity is often linked to stronger preferences for social order and purity, which holds more conservative

“or Republican political needs. And that's what Jonathan Heights says as well. And then he said 50”

years ago, there were no beepers. Took the math. Yep. There'd be 76 beepers, pages were patented in 1949 by Al Gross and first used in hospitals in 1950. Whoa. However, they became a mainstream consumer device in the 1980s. Yeah. That's when. Did you ever have a beeper? No. Yeah.

I get to the beeper phase. I had a beeper. You did. Yeah, I never even had one for work. And it was

so exciting when I worked at shows and shoots. It was like, I got my company beeper, which is great, because anyone can use it. How do you use it? So you're hanging out with your friends. Beep, beep, beep. And there's a certain way to look at it. Do you remember I wore a beeper

I do not. Which had a clear case. It was so sexy. And I found it. And it was still operational.

“And I would be talking to people. And then I would make it beep. And then you got a,”

there's like a cool way to look at it. Like you pull it off your thing. And then you hold it so far away. Like there's such pageantry with it. Because it's just like how you smoke everything has a ritual. A ritual around. Yeah. So you would like, oh, you know, you make a big deal of things. You want everyone to know you just come and it'd be someone's phone number. And it's just someone who wants to get a hold of you. And then you find a pay phone. And you call that number.

But also, there are codes, right? Oh. Yeah. So there could be codes. Like, um, because you call, it's a normal telephone number. It beeps. And then you can type in any number you want. So let's say you're nice with 64, meant meet at car for drinks. Oh. Oh. I could, what do I, so I pick up the phone. You call my number. Your regular phone number? Yeah. 24, 8, 6, 8, 5, 2, 9, 5, 8, which is the number of my page. No, the number of my page. Okay. Okay. And then you hear peep. And then you can start banging

in any number. And like, you can write hello. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. Which isn't useful because you don't know who it came from. Oh, but you would. It's felt thing. If you knew if it was 6, 2, 4, that it would be me. And then I would say hello. 4, 3, 1, 1, 0, if upside down look like hello. Sure. We used to do that on the calculator. Okay. Perfect. You're familiar with the technique. Wow. I still have my Bravo to somewhere because I know I used it at that party and I'll break it out again. Okay.

I mean, I would like to see it. It's an old relic. Yeah. It's fun. And you'll see how I look at it. And you'll know exactly why that's the coolest way to look at it. I don't even remember my parents having that. No. No. They skipped the page or phase. I mean, I'm sure they, I don't know. They must have had it. I remember my dad had a car phone mounted in the car. Yeah. That's so sure anymore. Probably not. He had a car phone. I know he had a car phone. But I want

to say the car mounted cell phones. My father was first in the door. Okay. You're looking at like

“85. Okay. And I think by the time we're at 90, when you would have been three,”

it could even remember. We've now gone mobile. They're not really installed. Hard mounting them in cars anymore. I think it was, I think it was mobile. But it was called a car phone. Yeah. You saw called the car phone because it started in the car. Right. And you got hard mounted to your transmission tunnel. Things have happened so quickly. It's crazy. I had a buddy in elementary school. This little bomb boy. I can't think of his name. He was so cherub like or he was a little angel.

It doesn't even weird. I was friends with him. He was kind of shy and angelic. But he had this mom single mom. And she was a car phone salesman. And it was like, she was crushing. And she was at the forefront of technology. She was like, she was in the business. Everyone wanted to be in. Wow. And that was the first time I ever saw a car phone. She had a big old car phone. Do you think she used the kid to sell makes sales? I don't know. I do. She should have, but I don't think she did.

Okay. He never got pulled out of school or anything in the middle of the day to close

the deals. Yeah. I'm on the verge closing this big deal. Okay. Ooh, what percentage of people are verbal thinkers versus visual thinkers? Assuming suggests that roughly 30 to 50% of people have a regular internal monologue verbal thinking. While others think primarily in visual images, emotions are sensory awareness. A commonly cited breakdown indicates less than 30 are strong visual thinkers. 25 think in words and 45 use a mix of both. I have had the same experience.

He described once he was asked to detail his thoughts because I've had a thought and then I've

“tried to think, did I think those words or just did the whole concept? It's almost impossible to”

know what just happened. It's too hard to know. Yeah. I don't think I have visuals. I don't either. But the other two, I'm confused by, I don't know what I have. But I think I have verbal. I think I'm thinking in words. I think I am too. But when I just do it tonight or whenever like when you have a thought, go like, okay, did I hear, let's go to car or did I just conclude? Let's go. I say let's go to car is that the follow-up to a thought I had that wasn't verbal. Well, what happens

first, check out the egg, check-in-but, check-in-but, I think I think I think I think I'm excited to have

Okay. I've been thinking about it. But let's put it this way. I don't hear the sentence that's

coming out of my mouth until it's coming out of my mouth. Right. So in that way, my thought is already expressed in this way, which means a continent thought all the words. Well, it could be,

“right now, it's just happening automatically. I think we're not, we're not talking about”

conversational thinking more when you're at your, when you're home and you're alone or whatever,

and you're just thinking, how is it coming to you? Well, my argument that I'm making right now is that

you're not thinking the words you're going to say before you say them. That's I am. You're not. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. No, I know. Put a, you're Mark on that. Um, so at least if we have proof that that we didn't need to hear it, and your thoughts are happening out loud as you speak.

“I know. So that, in that, at least in that example, it wasn't a script that then you heard it”

in English and decided to replicate it as you spoke. You just spoke, like that the information just comes out. Well, it's just happening at a pace we can't track. And if you're a visual thinker, you're not then what you're communicating, you're, you're mouth is still words. Blue flowers. But yeah. Okay. It's like sharp focus. It's all, it's all just happening very quickly. Yeah, I just, I believe there are visual thingers. I just personally can't comprehend it. I don't really know

what that would feel like. I was who could try it. Um, my dad tried to get catch me last night and

he did for a second. Tom Hansen, I was with Tom Hansen last night. And he asked my opinion on a certain

thing. And I gave it to him. And he said, um, he said, you're such a contrarian. And I go, no, no, I'm not a contrarian. And he goes, yes, you are. And then he's a lawyer. Yeah. And I go, hold on a second.

“The only way I could disprove that I am not a contrarian is to say, yes, I am a contrarian.”

So what you've presented is a non-falseifiable claim about me. And he said, that's why I like talking you most people don't get that when I trap them that way. I mean, uh, yeah. There's no answer to your a country. It's a great statement. It's like it's a judo move in the bay. It's got like saying you're defensive. Exactly. Yeah. It's a cheat. It's a cheat. Oh, you're being so defensive. Yes, I am. I guess you could say, I could see how you feel that way. And then you stop talking. And then you leave.

Yeah. Um, okay. When was Buddhism invented? Buddhism originated in northern India between the 6th and 5th centuries BC. Um, older than I thought. Yeah. It's all this shit. Oh, baby, old. Um, and that's it. That's that. Mm-hmm. So it's 1400-ish years old. You said 2000. That was my guess. Yeah. So I guess I thought it was older than it was. Yeah. And then I'm kind of like, that's not right. You're so contradictory. Oh, no. That was all the facts.

That's it. All right. Love you. Love you.